<Begin Segment 18>

KL: What were some of the kind of milestones of the rest of your life? I know you had jobs, I know you were married.

JO: Well, when I graduated from UCLA, I kind of delayed my graduation because I would have been twenty years old when I graduated, because of my skipping of the grades and stuff, and my birthday being in July. So I thought I'm going to wait until I'm twenty-one. And so I waited until I was twenty-one to graduate, so I graduated a little bit later than my normal, took me a little longer. But I also majored in business administration, and it's a BS degree. And for a BS degree, you're required 128 units, and I only had 120, so I had to go for another semester, eight more units. And I didn't want to go through summer school, so they stressed going to summer school, so I graduated. And when I went to look for work, because I was a business administration major, I couldn't really type that well, they immediately would give me a, hand me a sheet of paper and, "Go take a typing test." And, of course, I wouldn't do well. I could type thirty-five words a minute, I couldn't type the sixty or sixty-five required. So then when I applied for a junior administrative assistant, that was not available to me, because I was a female. And then I was Japanese, so a lot of companies wouldn't even look at a Japanese application. So I went all over applying and didn't get jobs.

So I finally applied for an accounting clerk job. I went to, I think I went to an employment agency, got sent to apply for accounting clerk job, and this life insurance company, Pacific Mutual... I don't know if it was Life... Fire Insurance. I think it was some kind of insurance, insurance, and I worked as an accounting clerk. But the guy sitting next to me was working as an accounting clerk but making a hundred dollars more per month. I thought this was unfair. But in the meantime I had applied for civil service, because I figured that if I went to work for civil service, I would get equal pay for equal work, and no discrimination on my sex or my gender or my nationality. The only problem was I wasn't a veteran, but I didn't know that at that time. So anyway, after working at this insurance company for three months, I already arranged to work for civil service, Department of Employment, they had this position called Employment Security Trainee, and they said, "If you have a degree you're qualified, or you have so many years of work." So I said I'll apply for that, and I applied for that. And the salary was a little bit more than I was getting. So when I quit this other job, I told them that I'm not getting the same pay as the guy, so I'm leaving. I didn't tell them I was getting another job. So I just told them, "I'm not getting equal pay for equal work, so I'm leaving."

And then I went on to my career as an employment security officer, which is handling unemployment insurance claims. But this was... things were so different in those days. We worked at the counter or you worked at a desk, people came in to apply for work, you review their application, you could send people out to work. And if you worked on the unemployment insurance side, and you got six months' training on each side, so unemployment insurance and employment security. Employment security meaning looking at applications and classifying them according to their work experience. And then the other one was unemployment insurance, see if they were qualified for unemployment insurance. After a couple of shootings with crazy people, they discontinued all of that, and everything was by mail. And they do have employment security, but I don't think it's like it used to be, where we have counseling, and there used to be testing with general aptitude test battery. So my career after that had to do with that kind of work, general aptitude test batteries and validating aptitudes required for certain occupations.

KL: So you stayed in that field for a career?

JO: Yeah. I worked at the department for thirteen years, but two of those years I spent working on the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and revising it. They were updating it from the 1939 version to the 1952 version, and so we were sent to Washington, D.C. for three weeks of training, and then I came back and we would write, we'd interview people in their workplace, observe them working, and then write descriptions and classify them according to data, people, and... things, data and people. I still remember that.

KL: Thirteen years.

JO: Yeah, I did that for... I did it for two years, but that was a really interesting assignment, and it involved a little more mental capacity than the stuff in the office, and it was just really... it's the same thing over and over, especially when it's paying out claims. They actually had people, less of a clerical staff do the paying out later on.

KL: And what about family? You said your husband was also in Manzanar. When did you meet?

JO: I didn't meet him until quite a bit later. I was living... my parents had an apartment, so I was living in one of the units. And my mother's friend, next door neighbor, who is, incidentally, was a class of '44 graduate of Manzanar, Terry Tsubota, I don't know if you know her. She's... she was part of the class of '44, she always goes to the Manzanar reunions, school reunions.

KL: I'll look for her.

JO: Terry... I don't remember, Terry something. Anyway, she was a friend of my husband's sister, who lived in the neighborhood, they're about the same age. No, they're not, she was a lot older. She's older. This is my husband's younger sister, so she was a lot younger, a lot younger than me. She told Terry that she had a brother who was coming to L.A., but he lived in New York, and he was coming to L.A. to live, and so did she know anybody? Said, yeah, the next door neighbors has a daughter, and that was me. So eventually my mother and Terry fixed me up with Terry's (friend's) brother, who was (James Okazaki). So that's how I met.

KL: It worked out.

JO: Yeah, I met him in November of 1962.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.